Making a Marx on history—celebrating 200 years since Karl Marx's birth

On the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Alex Callinicos looks at the lasting legacy of the great revolutionary

Published Tue 1 May 2018

Issue No. 2602

Karl Marx was born 200 years ago

Karl Marx died in obscurity in March 1883. A dozen people attended his funeral at Highgate Cemetery in London.

Even though he had been witch-hunted by the press of Europe for his role in championing the Paris Commune of 1871, The Times learned of his death from its coverage in French papers.

Marx has been buried again symbolically many times since. During the Cold War, the sociologist Daniel Bell announced the “End of Ideology”—by which he meant above all the end of Marxism.

In 1989, as the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia began to collapse, the US State Department official Francis Fukuyama went even further. He proclaimed the “End of History”. Liberal capitalism had triumphed over its rivals and would dominate the future.

At the time he wrote it this system occupied only a few beachheads. These were in Britain, a few other parts of northwestern Europe and on the northeastern seaboard of the US. But Marx understood that this system was in the process of conquering the world.

Indeed, in his most famous work, the Communist Manifesto, Marx almost celebrates capitalism, “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”

Many have pointed out that Marx’s description of capitalism in the Manifesto fits the contemporary era of globalisation very well.

He wrote, “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.”

But it is in Capital that Marx uncovers the underlying logic that makes capitalism behave like this.

Unfreedom

He starts with a chapter called “The Commodity”. It might seem like he’s agreeing with mainstream economists who identify capitalism with the market. But whereas for them the market allows us to realise our desires, for Marx capitalism is a realm of unfreedom and exploitation.

The means of production are controlled by capitalist firms that survive and flourish to the extent that they are able to sell their products.

This means they are driven by competition. The capitalists, like “hostile brothers”, seek to undercut each other, steal each other’s markets, and if necessary to drive each other out of business.

In this deadly struggle, profits are the measure of success. Building on Smith and Ricardo, Marx shows that these are created by the labour of the workers the capitalists employ to make their products.

In what he calls the “hidden abode” of production, workers are systematically exploited in order to screw as much profits as possible from them.

There also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production

Marx

Workers may seem free to choose their employer. But Marx points out, since they own only their labour power, the only way they can get access to the means of subsistence for themselves and their dependents is to submit to exploitation.

In one of the most brilliant parts of Capital he shows how the conditions for capitalist production are created by driving peasants off the land.

They have to become workers and through the process of conquest, robbery, and enslavement through which Europe came to dominate the world.

This is a system no one controls. To survive capitalists must not just exploit, but accumulate, or reinvest their profits in expanded and more efficient production.

It is this that leads to the dynamism and disruption that Marx celebrates in the Manifesto.

But competitive accumulation also gives rise to the crises that regularly punctuate the history of capitalism.

Firms invest more and more heavily in labour-saving technologies that bring down the rate of profit and push capitalism towards these crises.

But, Marx argues, “there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production”.

Divide

Capitalism depends on increasing cooperation in production, but seeks to divide and exploit the workers who do the actual producing.

This gives workers an interest in acting collectively against the bosses.

Solidarity is the essence of effective working class action. But it is also the basis of the alternative to capitalism—communism, a society run by the “associated producers”, in which the people who do the work make the decisions.

In 1870 Marx pointed to the racial antagonism between “native” British workers and Irish migrant labourers. He said this was “the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation.

“It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class.”

Marx’s thought retains its actuality therefore not just because of his critique of capitalism.

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